


(D)evolution

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, askverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-02
Updated: 2011-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-17 11:31:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Torchwood changes everything.  Even Janet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(D)evolution

**Author's Note:**

> This is Askverse Fic

They don't have a name for themselves. Well they do, but like all things, they know what it is, and they don't' see the point in telling the things they eat what they are. The things they eat don't seem to want to stop and ask, beyond the occasional, "What the f—" they eke out before her teeth rip into their foot or leg.

There's a lot of them, and that is a good thing. When she had first woken up here, dazed and frightened, they had come out of the ground and taken her, wrapping their arms about her and petting her head, lowing softly. It had taken her a few days to realise that the new constant song is one of loss. It hurts her ears sometimes, the sound of it, when all of her life it had been screeches and howls of comfort and gentle humor, and only the occasional sad song, at a death or the intrusion of hunters in her native land.

They give her clothes when hers become too worn. They aren't the fibres of her home, but they don't rub against her skin badly, and she doesn't much care. If she cannot have home, then she will use whatever is handy, and she will not dwell.

Like the food. Sometimes it's something small, furry, in the palm of her hand, and sometimes, when they feel like it, when they are discontent and wrathful and frustrated with the new sounds and smells of the New World, it is something larger. The four legged ones with the leather braces about their necks, obscuring the bite. The upbipeds. The ones that walk about in garish colours and pretend that they belong.

She hates them because they do.

Her new home is dark and cool and filled with moving things. She sleeps with her head in another's lap, her arms about another's shoulders, her feet flung over a pile of sodden rags, rags covered in their scent. When she dreams it is of forest, blanket copses and winged creatures that swoop from the expansive breadth of tree limbs above her. When she dreams, her feet twitch with the movement of running. When she dreams, she still holds her baby in her arms.

***

She learns enough of their tongue. She isn't stupid. She watches them through the sewer grates and the back alleys. She follows them into the wooded areas before she takes them. They look at her face and her hair and her clothes and their eyes widen so much that she wishes they would fall out of their heads and into her hands like shiny jewels.

She thinks that she can take Big Blue when he strides into the woods, hands in pockets, moving his lips in that high-pitched shrillness that she despises. He smells different, and she is in the mood for a challenge. And she is angry, a low level thrumming that makes her arms and legs ache. So she tries for him.

He's ready for her, and he delivers a few blows to her face. She lashes out with her hands, almost invigorated by one that fights back, that can fight back. He grins and when she catches his neck and tumbles onto him, she is so focused on his blood on her fingertips that she doesn't see the other coming from behind. The tree branch slams into her and she starts.

She is frenzied by that point and when she is able to get up, she's only able to make a few more hits before she is knocked down. Big Blue straddles her and sprays her face with something, and she finds that she cannot breathe well. Her limbs feel detached, and no matter how hard she tries, they will not work.

His face is smiling when he pulls the cloth over her head.

When she wakes up, Big Blue's on the other side of the clear surface, and she just looks at him. The other one, shorter, he smells like blood and preservative, cocks his head.

"They just keep getting uglier, don't they?" he says, and she blinks.

Big Blue crosses his arms, and the smell of him hits her face as it wafts through the holes in the clear hardness. She reaches out one hand to touch it; it's unyielding. He looks into her eyes, and she thinks she can say something to him that way, as if he can touch her mind. He blinks once with her, and then twice, and she opens her mouth to say something to him.

He shakes his head. "Yeah," he says, and he frowns. It is hard to tell what he wants to say.

Instead he says, "We should call her Janet."

***

The short one with the thin lips brings her meat and water. She doesn't thank him, and he doesn't stay for long. After a few days, he is replaced by another one, tall, thin, skittish, wide eyes. Big Blue comes down every once in a while. He stands in front of her and looks into the glass, his head almost bowed.

She wants to tell him that she needs to be free. She wants to ask him why she's here. Here in the cell, here in this New World. She wants to lick his skin off his face.

Instead, she settles for hitting the glass in front of him as if she can break it.

The thin one, the meat giver, brings the spray, and when she calms, lying on the stiff sterile bed that smells of dead others and chemicals, he pets her head while he sticks the pins in her, speaking softly. He might be explaining himself, but she cannot follow him when she is sleepy.

He smells like damp, and she falls asleep to the sound of his voice, the feel of his hand on her face.

When she wakes up, her arms are tired, and he has left her fresh clothes and a bag of salty crunchy disks. She likes the disks. He has left a flat box with moving pictures on it outside her cell, where she can see it. The pictures show a fish woman with flame hair, sitting on a rock. She's singing, but it is the shrill, up and down song of the upbipeds, like their talking and their screaming.

She settles in with the salty disks and watched the images dance on the screen.

***

Janet doesn't really know when she woke up thinking in their tongue, or when she decided that she hated them all, or rather, that hate is the emotion that she would put to it. Or even when she was aware of things around her enough to have developed a sense of speaking or listening, of deciphering. She doesn't know when she started to remember all the words to White Stripes songs, or how she has developed a taste for thumbing through the ee cummings that suitboy (now suitboy, in her head, in _English_ , no less.) had thrown at her one night.

"Theresa! This area is off limits!" a voice calls, and she looks up. The dog skitters across the floor in front of her cell, and Big Blue laughs when it nips at his ankles. To Janet he waves a cautioning finger. "Don't get any ideas," he says, smiling, because _of course_ she can't do anything. She's in a goddamn cell.

She rolls her eyes and goes back to the ottava rima she's composing in her head about decapitating Hart; the last two lines don't scan properly.

"Janet," Big Blue says, leaning against the cell wall. Janet cocks her head and pretends that she doesn't understand. They all do this, eventually, come down here and tell her things. She thinks that one day she will write a tell-all. The world should know about Martha and the vacuum attachments.

"I know you can't understand me, but sometimes I feel like we understand each other." He presses his temple against the glass and she snorts. They usually take that as an affirmative. Like she's fucking Flipper or Lassie or some shite.

His eyes get that far away look. "I'm going to marry Ianto," he whispers. "Don't tell anyone."

She rolls her eyes. Ass.

***

Hart licks the other side of the glass. Janet wishes that Owen was here. Owen would kick Hart's ass. He runs his fingers along his tongue and then rubs his chest, under his shirt. "You like it, huhnngh."

She isn't quite sure what to make of him. He's dangerous and also a little insane, and if she hadn't zoomed through that volume of Freud that Owen had given her on a lark, possibly by accident, then she wouldn't even be remotely interested in him. His eyes are too far forward, and she doesn't like his suggestiveness. Hell, it's gone past suggestiveness when he comes all over the glass, and she can smell it though the vent holes: motor oil and watermelons. She doesn't know how he manages that.

Martha catches him down here sometimes, and she pats his arse and makes him leave, but then she tries to give her retcon, which is always rather humorous. She can't tell Martha that she remembers everything. She wishes that Owen were still around, not for the fifteen millionth time. Owen had understood her value as a test subject. Martha seems to not see her, and she wonders what that means. She picks up the pill from where Martha has pushed it through the vent hole and tongues it. Mmmm. Minty.

***

 

Suitboy feeds the kebabs through the bars in the door. Once he brought her toaster pastries. She sees the ring on his finger and rolls her eyes. He frowns. Jesus fucking Christ, humans.

"Are you feeling all right? Do you have enough paper to gnaw on?" he asks her, as if she a) can answer and b) will deign to answer.

She won't admit that she likes suitboy. Well, okay. More than Ass(k), less than Owen, a shiteload more than Hart or Martha. Gwen is okay, she guesses, because she brings her choccies and talks to her like she's three, which is kind of irritating. Once she heard Assk refer to it as 'compassionating.'

But for now she looks at suitboy's lickable tie. Purple. The colour of fresh bruises, or blood as it hits oxygen, before it goes red. Arterial blood.

She misses running.

Suitboy slides a thick volume of Rousseau through the bars and it slaps onto the floor. She'll leave it there for now because she doesn't want to look too eager to have something to read. Mostly because they don't know she can. They must have interpreted Owen's instructions to give her books as a sign that she ate them as part of her diet. And she does. She just happens to read them first. Except for the Deepak Chopra. She just ate that fucker.

She thinks that she has to have some secrets. And that it had been a good thing that Owen's idea of tenderness had been to play the entire 'Hooked on Phonics' series on the speakers when he was feeling cranky with her. Sucker.

She smiles, but suitboy must not understand that for what it is, because he recoils a little bit. She has a soft spot for him (and all his soft mushy parts, oh, how she'd love to see them up close, taste them up close, on her tongue like so much velvet meat) because he'd let her fuck with that tied up man once, and while they'd denied her a fresh kill at the last minute, she did love to scare the fuck out of him. Of course, that had ended with spray in the face, something she has decided that she will avoid at all costs. It tastes like bile and dirt. If they could make retcon so minty fresh, why couldn't they do something about the spray? Mango flavoured or something.

She knows the answer. Fucking humans.

***

 _this fucking interface is bullshite,_ she thinks as she twists the wires together. it's earth tech, though, and she had scrounged it on one of her forays out of her cell, which she does every now and then on a lark. getting out of the cell is easy. it's getting out of the hub that's hard. she's stopped trying.

she had found the computer on one of her walks through a lower level, and dragged it back to her cell, not even sure what she was going to do with it. the computer would need to be rewired and the screen was shite, and she'd had to steal about ten feet of copper foil from hart's goddamn TACDIS contraption.

she works on it, shoving it under the bed when she has to, humming to herself a song that she had heard a few weeks ago on the monitors and cannot get out of her skull. it might have been akon. assk loves akon. she takes a break when suitboy comes down to feed her. _oh yes, thawed raw sheep and orange juice, thanks ever so._ she is once again relegated to myfanwy's leftovers.

after he leaves, she thumbs through a few of the new books she has. leaves of grass, which is quite disappointing (it's about HUMANS.) janet would have preferred to read about leaves of fucking grass. but the end is a glossary if the humanitarian edition, in her hands and she reads about the gender-neutral pronouns. she's been janet so long that she hasn't stopped to consider what this means. they say 'she'.

janet blinks. is that right? is it just the two? she? he? they? we? it? is it an 'it'?

the words are strobed in front of her eyes for a second: _Ze laughed. I called hir. Hir eyes gleam. That is hirs. Ze likes hirself._

she's stared at the words in the book as much as she can stand. she rips the pages out and stuffs them into her mattress. janet doesn't understand what about them she finds comforting. when she thinks of them, they remind her of a child she'd once had, as far away as the other side of existence and time, now.

she wishes that she had come up with the broke ass computer when owen had been alive, because she would have written him a note to tell him all of this.

janet flips the switch and the screen snaps on with a static sound. she smiles. those fuckers would pay now. Once she has messed about with the dosshell that she's been fucking about with, she abandons it for linux once she's online and waits for the processing to take.

it takes three days, but she's got the thing shoved under her bed, and besides, everyone is busy with some huge party that involves pimms and salad shrimps. in the middle of the celebrating, suitboy, now tuxboy, comes down and throws a half-full bottle of alcohol at her, and stuffs a half-eaten croissanwich into her cell.

she will never tell him that she's touched.

when the program has settled into the ancient computer and her mods, she surfs about, clicking the keys idly. she googles 'weevil'. she googles 'grannypanties' and 'molotov cocktail'. she googles 'torchwood'. ah, there, right the fuck there: ask. captain. jack.

they had to be fucking kidding.

Well, she has some fucking things to ask.

janet jumps through the hoops, there's always fucking hoops in the human world. are you a bot? are you human? what is your name? where are you? what mood are you? finally, she gets to tab over to "enter".

 _am i on?_

 _fucking commodore 64 piece of shite._

 _fucking torchwood._

janet sits back. and waits. she is good at that.

END


End file.
